Remembrance EP

Remembrance is the first proper release by Suicideyear, the project of young Baton Rouge-based producer James Prudhomme, on Daniel Lopatin’sSoftware label. Drawing from the electronic/rap subgenre of trap and offering his own spin on the genre, the tracks on Remembrance possess chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy.

Featured Tracks:

The music released on Daniel Lopatin’sSoftware label is Internet native. The context for this music is the digital space—that’s where the inspiration comes from, where the audience is, and how the music finds people. That’s true for a whole lot of music these days, of course, but from the name on down Software makes it explicit. Remembrance is the first proper release by Suicideyear, the project of young Baton Rouge-based producer James Prudhomme, but he’s been around online for a couple of years, putting out mixtapes, remixes, and original productions for rappers. The most widely heard of these to date is his beat for “Hurt”, for Swedish teenager Yung Lean, and it was a characteristic production: slow-to-midtempo, the brittle, rapid-fire electronic percussion fills that have come to signal “trap,” and spacey, melancholic synth lines appropriate for Lean’s “sad boy” aesthetic. Whatever else you might say about it, Suicideyear makes Internet music, work that clearly draws from the online music world’s abundance; but Prudhomme manages to put his own spin on this cluster of signifiers, finding a way to channel feelings in a distinctive way.

A couple of years back, Pitchfork contributor David Drake wrote a piece for Complex called "Real Trap Sh*t? The Commodification of Southern Rap’s Drug-Fueled Subgenre"*.*Among other things, it grappled with how ”trap music,“ emerging from a place of violence and powerlessness, could be transformed into something safe and fashionable through the magic of cultural tourism. "...The trap isn’t a genre, but a real place as portrayed through art," he wrote. "A place with real consequences." I thought of this when listening to Remembrance not because I think it comes at certain styles of rap production from an irresponsible perspective (that ship has probably sailed, anyway), but rather because Prudhomme takes very specific elements of this production, zooms in, and amplifies them until they become something else, something he can call his own. The tracks on Remembrance don’t sound like they’d be improved with people spitting over them, but they do connect to the emotional world of a certain kind of rap production, with chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy.

Which is to say that Remembrance is haunted by mortality, with synth drones that sometimes sound like organs bringing to mind the darkly meditative contemplation of a wake. Suicideyear combines the clean melodic lines of late-1990s IDM with the slow-burn anxiety of Zaytoven. The emotional range here runs from the stately grandeur of “Caroline” to the yearning “Hope Building A” to the dubbed-out and lonesome “Savior”, with its ghosted digital voices to the chiming “U S”, which sounds like the sort of music Death Waltz would have rescued from an early-’80s horror film soundtrack. There’s plenty of silence, enough for each snare clap and hi-hat flicker to carve out its own space, and there’s also an appealing uniformity to the whole. Remembrance knows the kinds of feelings it wants to evoke and how to make that happen, making for a record that possesses a very particular mood.

It isn’t until the closing track that Prudhomme tips his hand, offering up a slow and gorgeous cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep”. This is a risky move because MBV covers can go wrong so easily, but Prudhomme finds something new in the song, an iciness and feeling of isolation that move in opposition to the warmth found on the most oceanic of albums. It’s a neat trick that also encapsulates what makes Remembrance such a modest but ultimately captivating record, a way of taking sounds and textures from one context and transforming them into something that feels personal and close.